Jessica, United States
It started with being misdiagnosed by more than ten doctors. I kept showing up with symptoms that, looking back, were all there. Swollen lymph nodes. Night sweats. A chronic cough. Weight loss. Extreme fatigue. Every appointment ended the same way. I was reassured. I was dismissed. I was told it wasn’t serious. No one took me seriously. Things kept getting worse until I eventually ended up in the emergency room. I went into respiratory failure, and only then did doctors finally run the tests that should have been done much earlier. That is when I was diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. By the time I got answers, my body had already reached a breaking point. That moment changed everything and it is something I will carry with me for the rest of my life.
The biggest challenge was the physical toll of treatment. The constant nausea, the exhaustion, my white blood cell counts dropping so low that I had to be isolated. I couldn’t work. I lost my hair. I lost my routine. Over time, I started to lose my sense of who I was. At the same time, life around me kept moving forward while mine felt completely stalled. Watching the world continue while I was just trying to survive added another layer of weight to everything. But the hardest part came after treatment ended. Getting my life back was more difficult than I ever expected. I wasn’t the same person I was before cancer, and there was no clear roadmap for how to move forward. Everyone assumed that once treatment was over, things would go back to normal. They didn’t. Learning how to live again, in a body and a life that felt different, was the biggest challenge of all.
What helped me the most was writing. During treatment, writing became my outlet and my safe place. When everything felt out of control, putting my thoughts into words was the one thing that made sense. I started my blog, Lymphoma Barbie, as a way to process what I was going through in real time. It gave me a place to be honest about the fear, the isolation, and the reality of treatment without having to filter myself. Writing helped me feel less alone, and over time, it helped other people feel less alone too. That eventually led to writing my book, but even beyond the blog or the book, writing itself was what carried me through. It was how I survived emotionally. It gave me purpose on the days when everything else felt stripped away.
My experience with the healthcare system was awful. I was repeatedly misdiagnosed and not taken seriously because I was young and looked healthy. Doctors saw how I appeared on the outside and overlooked what was actually happening inside my body. While I was being dismissed, my cancer was spreading. It was metastasizing to multiple organs, and I didn’t know it. I was getting sicker, not better, and no one connected the dots until it was almost too late. I ended up in the emergency room and went into respiratory failure. That was the moment everything changed. Only then was the severity of my condition recognized, and only then was I diagnosed with stage IV cancer. I almost died. I consider myself one of the lucky ones because I survived, but I am painfully aware that many people don’t. Our healthcare system failed me in critical ways, and my story is a reminder of how dangerous it can be when patients are dismissed, especially young people who don’t fit the typical image of someone who is seriously ill.
If you’re going through hell, keep going. Even when it feels unbearable and endless, keep going. You are not alone, even when it feels like you are. There are others walking this same path, feeling the same fear and exhaustion, and many of them do make it out on the other side. Sometimes hope doesn’t come naturally, and that’s okay. On the days you can’t feel it yourself, borrow it from someone else. Hold on however you can. Take it one moment, one breath, one day at a time. Hope doesn’t always look like optimism. Sometimes it’s just choosing to keep going, even when everything hurts.